Velvety goodness

October 9, 2019 stgeorgeknits6 Comments

I’m much more comfortable with knitting than I am with crochet. Crochet projects can very easily not get finished. They can collect dust for a long time if I’m not careful. Well, it was time to finish this scarf.

This is a very soft chenille scarf, done with trebles and chain stitches only. It’s Sirdar Chenille DK yarn and although it’s quite bulky, it doesn’t feel too bulky because of the net-like finish. I actually like it a lot more than I thought I would.

I haven’t blocked this. I’m not sure how well chenille yarn would block so I didn’t bother. It’ll be crunched up around my neck, so who cares if it’s blocked or not? I certainly don’t.

Autumn is pretty much finished here (we had our first bit of snow today!). The other day it was nice and sunny, a rare thing this autumn, so I rushed to get pictures with the lovely reds of the ground.

Happy ~~knitting~~ crochet!

Good old 80’s

July 7, 2019 stgeorgeknits9 Comments

I have lots of yarn but I keep knitting old, unravelled jumper yarns. What’s wrong with me? I don’t know. I just hate wasting stuff and having a jumper in the wardrobe that never gets worn seems like waste to me.

I knitted a jumper in the mid-80’s. I liked it and wore it quite a bit for some time. After that I’ve not worn it at all. It was quite big, like jumper were in the 80’s and these days it wouldn’t fit inside a jacket or coat, and that makes it unusable, as far as I’m concerned.

So, I unravelled the jumper and knitted a smaller, simple, no-nonsense top-down jumper. Now it fits inside a coat. I don’t know anything about this yarn. It’s some kind of man-made fiber, possible mostly, if not entirely. In the 80’s I liked the colour. I liked those little colourful blobs. I still do. The yarn is quite thick and it only took about a week to knit this.

Back in the 80’s I remember thinking that this jumper is really warm because it’s so thick. Of course, it’s not that warm at all; I know that now. I plan to use it as an in-between seasons jumpers.

This scarf shows how much smaller the new jumper is compared to the old one. This is the leftover yarn from the jumper. The scarf is all garter stitch and I knitted until all the yarn was used. The scarf is about 160 x 32 cm so it’s a reasonable size.

None of this is helping me reduce my yarn stash but at least I didn’t waste much time on these AND at least now in my wardrobe there is a jumper I can use, rather than a jumper that just takes up space. The scarf is a bonus. WIN-WIN, methinks.

Happy knitting!

Scarf · Shawl · Stash busting

And it suddenly turned blue

June 15, 2019 stgeorgeknits6 Comments

Just a quick little scarf, and look! no snow in sight!

This is a stash busting scarf. I have no idea what the yarn is. It’s some bouclé yarn and I suspect made mostly of man-made fibers. It’s soft and feels nice. I had 75g of it in a fairly large and loose ball and it seemed to be all green. When I started knitting, I was surprised when it suddenly turned blue. And then I was even more surprised when the blue turned into purple. Shame the yarn ran out then and I only got just a hint of purple.

This was a quick little job and I used an odd ball of yarn to the last inch of it. Not bad.

Happy knitting!

Knitting · Scarf · Shawl

Rio of the Arctic

April 13, 2019April 13, 2019 stgeorgeknits5 Comments

I always have a problem photographing scarves and shawls. If they are stretched out to their full size, they are quite small in the picture, but if they’re just draped somewhere, you can’t see the shape of them.

I recently finished a shawl and had just that problem. I took it with me on a snowshoe hike in the hope that I would find a cool place to take the photos. Plus I like multitasking.

The pattern is ‘Rio‘ by Drops Design and it’s the same as this shawl. I had a little bit less than 200g of super-duper soft Teetee Primavera, a merino wool and silk mix. I didn’t even think about the fact that this yarn would not be enough. I just started to knit. I cast on a little bit less stitches than in the pattern. When I was almost done, it became clear that I did not have enough yarn. Because this shawl is knitted until you run out of stitches, it can’t just be ended where you run out of yarn.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll get another ball or two. Hah, little did I know but this yarn had been discontinued. All I could find online were some really dark colours. No thanks. I had no option but to start over, with even less stitches. I cast on another 10 stitches less. I thought that would leave me with plenty of yarn. Towards the end, I started to drip cold sweat and you know what? I finished the shawl with 15cm of yarn spare. It’s like I planned it (which, of course, I did!).

The striping is done completely randomly without any planning. I just winged it. The shawl measures about 185 x 32 cm. I like it being so long but shallow.

This building is by a lake but I’m not sure what it is. Someone’s little hideaway? A shed? It’s by a lake and there are no roads leading to it. During snow-less time it’s difficult to get to it because the lake is on one side and swampy forest on the other. My guess is that it’s someone’s fishing cottage and they arrive by boat. There are other buildings too, one of which is probably a sauna. Finns always have a sauna. Whatever this building is, it had some big nails on the wall in almost perfect places for my shawl. I like the weathered look of the wood, too.

Perhaps you’d like to see a few more pictures from the snowshoe hike. This place is walking distance from my house. I tend to spend more time on this lake when it’s frozen than I do when it isn’t. It’s easier to walk on it in winter than around it in the summer.

This cute green building must be the loo. I could imagine this loo looking even prettier in the summer when it’s the same colour as all the leaves on these birches.

This is an always unfrozen bit of the lake, and it’s where a river starts. When it’s colder, it looks brilliant with steam and the water edges are full of ‘ice flowers’.

And this is looking the other way from the same spot. And yes, it’s the said river. There are two ramshackle bridges leading to nowhere. They are quite scary because you really don’t want to fall into the river in winter. Or even in the summer, come to think of it.

It’s the time of year we call spring-winter. It’s not properly winter anymore, but it’s not spring either. It’s totally on its way though.

Happy knitting!

Knitting · Scarf · Shawl

Fab shawl

March 3, 2019 stgeorgeknits11 Comments

I bought some Patons Fab yarn some years ago during my travels in Britain. I bought it because it was so colourful and I had a plan for it, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. I knitted a shawl with it instead.

I used the Rio pattern by Drops Design, which is a nice, not-quite-symmetrical shawl. I used a thicker yarn than that in the pattern, so I cast on less stitches (131 instead of 165 – just an arbitrary number that felt right). My shawl is still bigger (206 x 36 cm instead of 180 x 30 cm).

The pattern is very nice. The stitches are increased on one end every other row and decreased on the opposite end every row. So the stitches go down by one every second row and you carry on until you run out of stitches. It’s all garter stitch. Perfect no-brains-required knit.

Because the shawl is relatively big, it’s difficult to take a photograph to show the shape of it properly. I pinned it to a fallen down tree with thumb tacks! So you can see that the highest point of the triangle is not in the middle and the shawl is nicely kind of skewiiff.

And just a detail picture because I like the bright colours against the clean, white snow. The yarn Fab is 100% acrylic. I can’t quickly come up with any benefits that acrylic yarn has but at least it feels soft around the neck. Of course, I think the colour is just fab.

These outdoor pictures were taken on a swamp, just behind our house. My plan was “just to nip out and take the pics”, so I didn’t bother with snowshoes. It would have been hard work even with the snowshoes on but without them, I was up to my thighs in snow. The distance of just 20m feels almost like a marathon. In the middle of the winter you always appreciate how simple and easy it is to move around and to photograph your knitting when there is no snow on the ground. Couple of more months to go!

Happy knitting!

Knitting · Scarf · Stash busting

Tiny scarf

November 29, 2018 stgeorgeknitsLeave a comment

Over the years I’ve been given lots of yarn by my mother and grandmother. Lots of the yarn is the kind that I would not necessarily buy myself but I have no problems using it. I’ve often made these little garter stitch triangle scarves.

Here’s how:

Cast on 3 st.
1st row: Knit 3 st.
2nd row: Knit 2 st. and knit the last stitch from front and back. (4 st.)
3rd row: Knit 3 st. and knit the last stitch from front and back. (5 st.)
Continue like this, increasing 1 st. at the end of every row until the scarf is the desired size or you run out of yarn.

Alternatively you can use any other increasing method you prefer, at the start of the row, or that the end of the row.

Gauge and needle size are not important. The beige yarn I used is by Lammy Yarns and it’s called Pluche. It probably hasn’t been in production for donkey’s years. The gauge mentioned for this yarn is 20 st. and 22 rows = 10 x 10 cm. Needle size 4. I used 4 1/2. 50g is 125m and that amount, little over 100m, makes a scarf that’s just big enough to tie around your neck but not too big to fit under a coat. I find that they fit nicely under a thinner autumn jacket. This scarf measures 66 cm on top (widest part) and 36 cm high (highest part). Obviously, if you have more yarn and/or want a bigger scarf, keep knitting until it’s big enough.

Shame the colour of this scarf is a bit anemic but teamed with a darker coat it should be ok.

Happy knitting!